The largest of Michael Victor ▪ MVR’s digital paintings, derived from artworks he paints with hard pastels and then scans, recall Post-Impressionism. But instead of small markings of paint, MVR’s landscapes develop from ‘found pixels’ that make up ‘rasterized’ art work. Lucent textured-color effects, which arise from distinctive hand-drawn patterns of pastel pigments, serve as ‘raw material’ for painting. Throughout MVR’s ‘pixel painting’ with it, a magnetic psychic quality binds intricate tessellations together; in his most advanced works, vast interrelated elements render them spatially eloquent. While some works recall Degas and others Seurat, the artist engages his pixels, colors, and the spatial breadths of his landscapes on their own terms, confronting his paintings with questions to be answered through his process of close-up investigation, discovery, and interpretation of ‘captured’ pixels. The result is an organic response to the incessant stream of pixels delivered by 21st century mass media; a priori realities saturated with natural, often fantastic textures and colors to simulate familiar landscape environments. Via the above, the atmosphere in MVR’s work goes electric with amplified vitality – felt from works’ broad, sweeping strokes down to minute pixel configurations – reminiscent of Seurat. The difference is — owing to variations in landscapes, times of year, light conditions, and hand-rendering techniques – as MVR claims, “source pixels have such tremendous variety in configurations to yield dozens of fresh artistic effects.” Equipped with new, efficient means of digital assembly, such numbers of innovative works from him may very well be on the horizon.